Nicholas Aguayo

Region: Pacific Coast

My paintings are objects that reveal the process of their making through a layered transparency. The structural seams of the paintings are laid bare, their surfaces acting as diagrams of thought processes and decision-making.

Making paintings is a physical activity that is performative. The tactility of painting and the use of concrete materials is a way of responding to visual and physical experience in a tangible way. I am interested in paintings (and abstraction in particular) not only as a way of responding to these experiences tangibly, but also as a vehicle to communicate a narrative or psychological effect that exists outside language or representation.

In my recent paintings, compositional elements are organized in a way that recalls an operating table, in which the anatomical parts of a painting are dissected. The compositions swing between harmony and a kind of dissonance. I’m interested in the paintings resting in this state of almost falling apart, and in how this status creates a tension that challenges and questions the expectations of a painting.